It
was to more modern masters, to Emerson and Hawthorne that she naturally
and finally turned. To Emerson the mystic in her made quick response,
and not only the mystic, but the lover of unhampered, independent
thought and action. To her he was always "the friend and helper of all
who would live the life of the spirit"; and throughout her life, phrases
and paragraphs from his essays remained in her memory as shining
strands of living light.

She would sometimes sit
beside her table far into the night reading his pages, until the lamp
burned dim and low; but it was by some instinctive selection of a
fitting environment that she reserved Hawthorne for the soft, scented
gloom of the pine glades, or the rocky
ledges of the hillsides, where the sound of the plashing, falling water
sang in her ears and the wind whirled the sun-flecked, flickering
shadows of the aspens over her open book. With the wood-silence about
her, the wind stirring the hair on her brow, she read those mysterious,
beauty-haunted pages, her imagination captured and enthralled until she
did not feel the wind, nor see the shadows chase and fly. Into the tales
she plunged as might one into some deep, limpid pool, and rose
invigorated with the cold, pure refreshment of the " ethereal water."

But she did not always read. There were hours when she wandered up the slopes of the hillsides and into the depths of pine gloom,
when she stood on the edge of steeps which fell away so sharply and
abysmally that the eye plunged happily through the dense bracken and the
brown and purple trunks of the giant pines into the deeps of
deer-haunted shadow. Again she would wander to some more level spot,
where the pines grew low and spreading, their branches twisted and distorted
into strange and grotesque shapes by the mighty mountain winds; but if
bent and stunted, they were strong. They had prevailed, and stood but
the more deeply rooted in the soil, ever sending out new buttresses
against the rushing legions of the enemy. Their flat, mossy tops they
spread in air, black, green, blue, russet, silver, in the sea of
sunlight they floated on; but beneath the branches brooded the peace won
through resistance, and in the long aisles was the dim, mysterious
light of the pine woods, sunlight falling through close meshed nets of green.

It was always very still there; the foot sank noiselessly into the faded brown carpet of last year's needles, and there was fragrance, austere, balsamic—and music.

About the high, white peaks the winds roar and
scream, or wail and mourn down the gulches, or whisper and murmur among
the aspens and maples; but in the pine forests
it sings the songs of the sea; sometimes the rippling melody of the
surf washing softly against the shore, and again the organ roll of the
solemn, majestic ocean surges; but always the sea music.

Ah, there is magic in the pine forests! One hears untranslatable harmonies; one sees strange subtleties of colour, and the fragrance is the complement of both. Frances loved the pine glooms.
She would sometimes spend hours within the shadowy aisles, an ascetic,
blackrobed figure, with pale, uplifted face, drawn back, it would seem,
by the weight of hair; but there was nothing ascetic in her glowing eyes
and smiling mouth as she listened to the sea-music the wind sang to the
pines, and inhaled the pine fragrancewith a
rapture which no flower scents could give her; until the grey, shackling
chrysalis of her past life would fall from her and she would feel the
soar and lift of wings, while from some depth of being there welled the
thrilling impulse of joy.The new missioner

By Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

Then, the train is literally racing down hill —
with the trucks bumping heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish
team; and a new tang comes to the ozone — the tang of resin, of healing
balsam, of cinnamon smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of
spiced sunbeams and imprisoned fragrance — the fragrance of
thousands upon thousands of years of dew and light, of pollen dust and
ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of Persian roses, but of the
everlasting pines.

The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment
of the mountain; and you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon
rank of the blue spruce and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of
light hitting back from the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is
sifted pollen dust — pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the
tree — with the purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green
arms of the conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the
cones tell you somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier
man. Some conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the
seed, whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy
parachutes, airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest
growth, though the process may take the trifling aeon of a thousand
years or so. At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is
full of the yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy,
could we but know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another
season — the season when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests — the
very atmosphere is alive with these forest airships, conifer seeds
sailing broadside to the wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't
you? If they dropped plumb like a stone, the ground would be seeded
below the heavily shaded branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless
seeds; but when the broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to
the veering wind, the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the
area of the shaded branches; to be caught up by other counter currents
of wind and hurled, perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest
the naked side of a cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too,
worth remembering and crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature
that destruction by fire tends but to free these conifer seeds
from the cones; so that they fall on the bare burn and grow slowly to
maturity under the protecting nursery of the tremulous poplars and
pulsing cottonwoods.

The train has not gone very far in the National
Forests before you see the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from
branch to branch. From the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter
of his parted teeth, you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit
of his squirrel (?) language; but that is not surprising. This little
rodent of the evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he
alone, knows the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so
full of fire when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years
of sunlight and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the
burned or scant slopes, he rifles the cache of this little furred forester, who suspects your noisy trainload of robbery — robbery — sc — scur — r — there!

Then, the train bumps and jars to a stop with a
groaning of brakes on the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water
tank; and you drop off the high car steps with a glance forward to see
that the baggage man is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a
scrunch, the train is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy
vapor like a cloud against the lower hills. Before the rear car has
disappeared round the curve, you have been accosted by a young man in
Norfolk suit of sage green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree —
the ranger, absurdly young when you consider each ranger patrols and
polices 100,000 acres compared to the 1,700 which French and German
wardens patrol and daily deals with criminal problems ten times more
difficult than those confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without
the military authority which backs that body of men.

You have mounted your pony — men and women alike
ride astride in the Western States. It heads of its own accord up the
bridle trail to the ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea
level, 1,000 feet above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodpecker,
the scur of a rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft
thug of the unshod broncho over
the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the soul of the sea
from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the jangle of city cars
in that
stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested town, isn't it?

If there is snow on the
peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of the air. You hear it in
the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills of the brook babbling
down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are hushed and low keyed
in this woodland world. And all the time, you have the most absurd sense
of being set free from something. By-and-by when eye and ear are
attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine needles
glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles like fairy
castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of these
condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods; for
you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made
offerings to the gods of old, the temple which our modern churches
imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in
open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no
apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically
from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which
permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust
is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will
make you over, will these forest gods, if you will let them, if you
will lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with
the chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.

And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods halfway? Then, the woods will
close round you with a chill loneliness unutterable. You are an alien
and an exile. They will have none of you and will reveal to you none of
their joyous, dauntless life secrets.
THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST

By AGNES C. LAUT

"All outward wisdom yields to that within.

Whereof nor creed nor cannon holds the key;
We only feel that we have been,
And evermore shall be.

"And thus I know, by memories unfurled,

In rarer moods, and many a nameless sign,
That once in Time, and somewhere in the world,
I was a towering Pine."

When the writer was a "freshman medic" she acquired the spruce pillow
fad—for were we not told by our professor of materia medica that tired
brains may be soothed into forgetfulness of quizzes, "exams" and other
horrors of medical college life by the fragrance of oleum pini sylvestris? No college "den" was complete without one or more spruce pillows. While my love for the pine tree
was and is sufficiently general to include every branch of the very
large pinus family, which embraces the spruce pillow variety, my
preference naturally inclined me to want a pillow of the Georgia pine. No northern member of the pine family,
I imagined, could possibly be more fragrant and soothing than its
southern relative. Imbued with this idea, I wrote my mother to send me
from Georgia to New York a bagful of needles of Georgia pine.

The Pine-needle Basket Book

By Mary Jane McAfee

Then a better thought occurred to me as I looked
at the heaps of soft—toned burrs. “When we're in the city in the winter,
we’re always longing for the sights and smells of the forest. We’ll
take all we can of it down with us.” My girl friends laughed at me, but
they lent themselves readily to the task.

No doubt the squirrels
and chipmunks were much surprised at our continued activity. What could
we want with the empty cones? I hope we mystified them as a punishment
for their greediness.

We. gathered the most
perfect cones of each variety, roaming the woods for days in our hunts.
We stripped the cedar of its branches of bright green moss. We gathered
sacks of slippery needles from the fragrant pine, and still more fragrant fir. We gathered cedar boughs laden with blossoms, and huge blocks of bark from the redwoods.

We pricked the swollen globules on the bark of
the smooth firs, and filled bottles with pure balsam. We ordered
beautifully grained cedar boards from the lumber-mill, and made each of us a cedar chest to hold our treasures.

Rifling of the Forest by Mary Powell

THE road upon which the Indian was driving led out into a pine forest, between
the stately trees of which Marian caught glimpses of cloud-enshrouded
mountains. The cold, the raw wind, the increasing gloominess of the day,
with its ominous threat of storm, in no wise checked her momentary
enthusiasm and awakening joy for the open country. For as long as she
could remember she had been cooped up in a town, and in her heart love
of nature had been stultified. At last! She breathed deeply of the keen
air, and the strong, pitchy smell of pine began
to stimulate her. "What mountains?" she asked. "Spanish Peaks," replied
the driver. She made other inquiries to which he gave brief and
unsatisfactory replies. Perhaps it took all his attention to keep the
car in the road. Besides, the car made such a rattle and clank that
conversation was really not easy. Marian ceased asking questions.

The road led through a forest of pines such as she had never seen, wonderfully fragrant and exhilarating after the cities and railroads.

Vanishing America by Zane Grey

But lonely as the pine-forest is, and to a
certain extent monotonous, it is impossible to tire of it The vistas of
endless brown or silvery cylindrical stems, that rise to a height,
sometimes of two hundred feet, have a charm that absolutely rivets the
eye. There is a sense of youth and life and freshness about these mighty
ever-springing giants, which imparts itself to the beholder, an
exuberance of strength, of which the wayfarer seems to gather a portion,
as the fragrance of the pinewood is
wafted to his nostrils by every breeze that stirs the far-away shadowy
branches, or shakes the golden cones to his feet

You should have seen her surrounded by raisins, black currants, pumpkin
sauce, peeled apples, sugar-boxes, and plates of golden butter, her
plump hand pearly with flour dust, the whole kitchen redolent with
ginger, allspice, and cloves! You should
have seen her grating orange-peel and nutmegs, the border of her
snow-white cap rising and falling to the motion of her hands, and the
soft gray hair underneath tucked hurriedly back of the ear on one side,
where it had threatened to be in the way.A THANKSGIVING DINNER.—Mrs. Ann S. Stephens.

About Me

Since childhood I have been interested in the world of natural aromatics. This interest gradually developed into our home business White Lotus Aromatics. Keypoints along this aromatic journey were:
1) living on a small farm in India where many tropical fragrant plants were to be found
2) a career in horticulture, highlighted by working on a formal garden estate, Filoli
3) many journeys throughout the length and breadth of India to explore India's ancient and modern aromatic traditions.
Please note that I have an interest in the wonderful world of natural aromatics, but have no therapeutic expertise. Any mention of ayurveda or other traditional healing systems in strictly for cultural interest.